Entre la perception et l’opinion: le cas des stratégies discursives de persuasion dans la critique de cinéma

This paper examines the discursive construction of persuasiveness in media language. Analysing the corpus consisting of forty reviews of the French comedy “Intouchables” (2011), different invariant characteristics of the genre ‘film review’ are established in the light of two discursive strategies of persuasion based on metonymy and the rhetorical argument from community and authority. As the mentioned strategies assume that the discourse is to influence the addressees’ will, decisions and emotions, they reflect some of the persuasive techniques used in advertising discourse, especially with regard to indirect means of interpretation, suggestion and evaluation. Therefore, different methods for (re)construction of the reality presented in the analysed texts stem from shared values and emotions becoming starting points for the deliberative dimension of the film review. Since our perception of the world is relative, the deployed strategies aim at eliminating the information verification process. Thus, they shape the interpretation of the message towards a set of parameters governing its attractiveness in order to meet the contemporary addresses’ needs.